Sunday, April 26, 2009

Sea Ice blips

Stoat links to this IJIS plot of Arctic sea ice extent for the last several years. My question is, why is there a weird upward blip in the data every year about June 1st?

UPDATE: I asked JAXA, and here's what they told me (it's along the lines of what we all expected):

Current version of data processing makes an erroneous bias ofsea ice extent on June 1st and October 15th which are seenin the graph of sea ice extent as a small blip on these dates.The apparent bias arises due to a switching of some parametersin the processing on both dates. The parameter switching isneeded because the surface of the Arctic sea-ice becomeswet in summer due to the melting of ice which changessatellite-observed signatures of sea-ice drastically.

We are planning to improve the processing to make the gapmuch smoother soon.